Is your E-Commerce Store ready for Black Friday?

Is your e-commerce store ready for Black Friday?

Last year Black Friday sales broke $1 Billion and total holiday spending was over $89B. If you haven’t already started to prep your online business for the upcoming holiday season, you should begin now… focusing first on Black Friday! It’s time to prepare your website so you will be ready to take advantage the biggest shopping day of the year.

Here are 5 steps you can take to prepare for Black Friday and the rest of the holiday season:

1) Make a plan now

Consider crafting a calendar to organize your sales efforts. Checklists and target dates create a coordinated, professional approach and keep your business on track during the hectic weeks leading up to Black Friday. Your calendar can include:

Dates to have your blog post and email ready by

Date to check your infrastructure security

Date when ad campaigns should be designed and launched

Date to check site readiness for high traffic and sales

Dates when you’ll send out email newsletters

Dates for different promotions

2) Discounts and Sales

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and most end-of-year holidays are all about the sales. Shoppers, especially online shoppers, look forward to incredible savings and plan ahead in order to take advantage of these great once-a-year savings. Now is the time to set a schedule and plan when you are going to offer your customers savings. Black Friday shoppers come looking for the best-of-the-best deals, so offering sales for a limited time might lower your profit margin but it can increase your overall sales totals.

Decide which promotions will last throughout the Black Friday sales event and which offers will only run a portion of the day. Schedule when sales prices should be applied, shaping a plan that helps different pricing and sale lengths balance your desire to both increase traffic and sales throughout the shopping weekend. For each special offer, be sure to display a countdown to let customers know time is limited. Be sure to display both the sale price and standard price to your visitors so they can calculate how much of a bargain they are getting.

3) Set up Holiday Social Media

Now that you have decided what promotions you’re going to run, you need to get the word out. Offering the best deals on the internet can’t increase your sales if no one knows about them! Create holiday themed coupons and targeted ads and banners for your social media marketing campaigns. Think about your specific market and decide how you want to target customers. Consider the following options for your Black Friday sales promotions:

Email Marketing – Use your email list to send out early offers to your existing customers

Pay-Per-Click (Google Adwords) – Consider bidding for high demand keywords such as Free Shipping, Limited time offer, holiday sale, and so on

Pinterest – Display your products with buyable pins

Facebook Ads – Quick and easy, you can set up Facebook Ads in about 30 minutes

4) Update your SEO

Black Friday is all about holiday shopping. People are looking for great buys on gifts and related holiday merchandise. It’s time to update landing pages, product descriptions, email campaigns and SEO’s to reflect what potential customers will be searching for. Using keywords such as holiday, seasonal, savings, Christmas, gifts, and Black Friday will help attract visitors to your sales event. This may sound like a daunting task but if you run on a quality eCommerce platform, it should be a fairly straight-forward task.

5) Infrastructure

Once you’ve planned Black Friday sales to attract shoppers, it’s time to get your website ready. E-commerce is extremely competitive, more so on Black Friday than any other time of the year. It’s hard enough to get that first click to your website when online shoppers have so many choices, so you need to make every click count. Ensure your website is running at peak performance now to create an enjoyable shopping experience and will keep them browsing your entire online store. Pages that don’t display properly on mobile devices will not hold customer attention long enough to encourage sales. Here are a few things to double check as Black Friday draws near:

Check your traffic capacity – Black Friday is not the day to have your website crash! By checking your traffic over the course of the year, you can form a rough idea of how much capacity you’ll need to handle the increase in site traffic Black Friday sales will bring. Check with your hosting provider if you need to scale your servers up and down as demand fluctuates.

Clean up your cache – Landing pages and banners that load slow and navigating will lose customer attention, so do a little house cleaning to ensure your site is at optimal speed. Be sure to clean the log files and delete old entries and redirect any inactive links. Remove any unnecessary data that could slow your sites and keep those shoppers clicking.

Check your mobile compatibility – Now is the time to be sure your website and landing pages are mobile compatible. In 2014, on Black Friday in, mobile traffic had claimed 46.7% of all online traffic – an increase of 24.2% over last year and totals for the entire Thanksgiving holiday saw traffic from mobile devices account for 52.11% of all online business. A good service provider, like Pinnacle Cart, can help you optimize your website and create apps for mobile devices.

Check your transaction security – You aren’t the only one gearing up for the biggest online shopping days of the year. Hackers will be working overtime trying to access holiday shopper’s private and financial data. Customers demand safe and secure transactions, so take this time to double check your website security with your hosting provider to ensure your shopping cart software complies with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. Being hacked is devastating to a company’s reputation, be sure your site is secure this holiday season.

Black Friday is on it’s way. Start gearing up today. By setting up your promotional plan, calendar, and website you can ensure a smooth and profitable holiday season for your customers and your e-store.

What are you doing to get ready for Black Friday? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

As you have mentioned above, on this holiday occasion there is a chance of offering some deals to customers through different media. And we have started with sending newsletter to some of our selected customers, but unfortunately we have not got much impact yet! What do you think, as a photo editing company should we try email marketing for increasing the visitors as well as potential customers?

Craig Fox

The short answer is YES. Email marketing is still an effective method for driving sales and if you have a “selected” list, I’d be sure to get on it. DO NOT send out anything until you’ve packaged a compelling offer that you know will motivate. Additionally, most emails never get read so one of the most important elements is the subject line. Be interesting, engaging and generate impact. That 5-8 word sentence is everything, make it count. Spend some time creating the offer, use the thesaurus and come up with short sentences that generate emotion. Become your target customer and review your offer, you should feel driven to buy. Almost like you’re losing out if you don’t take advantage of what your offering. Be short and to the point. If you do get the click, most won’t read 1 or 2 sentences in unless you’ve captured their attention. This may seem like a lot of work for just an email, but think of how much better you’ll be at this on the next send. I’d suggest having brainstorming sessions with others, it helps

Also, look beyond email. It’s good for existing customers, but your business needs new customers in order to thrive. Are you using social media, SEM, content marketing and other methods? Have you tried re-marketing? Have you tried landing pages? You need your internet marketing program to include an all encompassing marketing mix to reach your target though the right venue, at the right time. The good news is the internet is the perfect medium to be able to deliver that message.

Hey Craig thank you so much for your such insightful suggestions. Yes we are already continuing all other mediums for getting visitors as well as customers. We were actually trying to add another option here and that was email marketing. Yes we have not got much effect on this yet but will continue it indeed.

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Nancy P is a Midwest native who recently made a move out to the Old West. When she's not taking the eCommerce education world by storm, she enjoys photographing the beautiful cacti and desert landscapes that surround her.